Adam's Blog

Nice. So one day late after launch I get my hands, and finger prints on a new iPod touch, to keep me sweet until the iPhone is out, but also to help on a 14hr flight to Thailand next week.

Gotta say, first play I love it. The interface is just lovely to use. Especially after using the shitty jerky bug-ridden interface on the N95. I haven't properly set it up yet, but the few photos, tunes and vids I have put on there look amazing. The touch zoom interaction works so naturally, I even think my Nan could use it.

The gimp in me ensured the WiFi was configured and working as a priority, after which I chose to watch YouTube on a 4inch display while sitting in front of my computer. Gotta love watching steaming videos from your hand. Trips to the toilet have remained frequent throughout the day.

Posted by Tumbleweeds at 5:33 pm | Permalink | Comments

Well, after 4 weeks of waiting for Hans 'sitting on' Fritz to send over a simple spring from Germany, I decided to give up on the GT3.

This pretty much worked out for the best, given that everyone I've been within a 5 mile range of since last month has told me it was a stupid idea. Buying a track car to sit on Woking ring road for hours on end is pretty much like going out with Jordan to capitalise on her vocab for intense games of Scrabble.

Anyhow, this little beauty came on the market on Friday night, and was duly purchased by noon the next day. Although a little slower than the GT3, it has absolutely every extra going for it. Much more practical for everyday use. Ah, you gotta love it when you have the ability to convince yourself that spending every penny you've ever earnt on a car is actually considered practical. It's all about points of reference!

So, I drove it back from the dealers and actually fell in love. I didn't realise there was this extra element to driving, actual pleasure at every twist and turn, and this has nothing to do with speed, more down to the way it handles. Its 4WD and is pretty much on rails as you take it round a bend at full pelt. Although getting up to 60 in the time it takes to shit your pants is also fucking cool.

Being a closet geek, the technical stuff got me just as excited, the built in phone, satnav, actual computer, BOSE sound system, etc... The geek police stopped me only a few clicks away from texting Twitter from the dashboard computer. That would have represented a new low. Almost as low as writing a blog when there are keys in my pocket and....

Posted by Tumbleweeds at 8:00 pm | Permalink | Comments

It was a Saturday morning, I was ten minutes early for a haircut and had some time to kill / hands to warm before my appointment. Wandering around Windsor enjoying one of the first Saturday mornings I've ever seen without a hangover, I found myself staring into the window of a Sony Center in much the same way a Big Issue seller would stare into the happy place that is McDonalds and imagine the sweet sweet taste of a Big Mac.

With my brain totally switched off for fear of a rational thought, I wandered in to look at the tellies. Hmmm, nice HD tellies.

After being asked several times if I needed assistance by unknowledgeable Saturday staff, I showed an interest in an LCD Bravia TV. To fill the rather large hole left in my soul due to the fact I couldn't pick up my car this weekend, I went on to further quench my thirst for irrational purchases by picking up the TV and one of only 3 remaining PlayStation 3s, convincing myself that I 'needed a Blu-Ray player anyway' and that this is just a cheap (thus actually saving money) way to achieve that. An eager salesman with very little persuading threw in an extra wireless controller, HDMI cable and TV stand with it as well. The gaming joy awaiting was going to be unstoppable.

Turned out to be a rather expensive hair chop, but the rest of the day was as expected as I breached new levels of geek configuring the PS3 to my wireless, PSP and after much faff, Flickr Account with the help of Flickr Backup. All about seeing your photos in 3D realness.

I then joined fellow excited geeks across the country in Resistance: Fall of Man in multiplayer mode, where I soon realised that due to my arms being longer than anyone else online, my hand/eye co-ordination made for great cannon fodder. Still great though, I'd even go as far as to say its the most fun you can have online with two hands.

Posted by Tumbleweeds at 12:07 am | Permalink | Comments

Although she's drained me of most of my disposable income over the last 2 years, I love this car and only have just one more drive to work in it before its taken off my hands forever.

I just sold it to a chap from Auto-trader made me an offer. I've added £2.5k of body kits, exhausts, induction kits etc over the past year which made bog all difference to the resale value. As much as I enjoyed chavving it up, I won't be making that mistake on my GT3 that I plan to pick up on Saturday, having been Carlos for 4 days.

The guy I sold it to is only from Lightwater, so I will no doubt see her again with another man caressing her steering wheel as he takes her up the M3.

Posted by Tumbleweeds at 9:02 pm | Permalink | Comments

Just got back from 4 days in Warsaw in Poland. We stayed at the Oki Doki hostel, which was my first hostel experience. On the first night, because I booked separately, I was led off from the comfort of actually staying with anyone I knew and had to share with 7 other strangers. Properly weird. Nice though, pretty freindly - once you get into the idea of a hostel is to pretty much chat shit to people all day.

I had to stay on the top bunk, and crept into the room at about 4am. Everyone was already asleep as most people were bumming around Europe on a £3 budget and evenings were traditionally about reading, pool and generally wasting a year in the most unconstuctive means possible. I however, was putting my time to great use by poisoning my body on as much Vodka as they could serve.

This was possibly the worst night, as I after about 5 seconds, realised that I needed a pee, so took my drunkeness to the toilet, waking everyone up a second time by crashing into everything in my path. So, after a night of holding in farts (I was a mixed dorm, I'm not an animal), being careful not to snore and trying to lie in silence, I put myself in for transfer.

Re-bonded with my pals, I could be myself and not have to worry about noise or being a drunken English arse.

So the rest of the trip was pretty much the same deal. When its 50p a pint, or about a quid for a very large vodka, there's not really a choice.

There was one moment when we decided to do something other than drink, purely so that we had something else to say to parents and girlfriends that could possibly form the beginnings of a conversation. We went to an old Nazi Prison where the SS pretty much sank to the lowest forms of humanity during the German occupation of the second world war. Very interesting, and slightly depressing, but worth going to. The stark contrast from the evening's activities was a little surreal, and hard to believe it didn't happen all that long ago.

Nazis aside, we then set out about town for night number two. We started off in the hostel, spoke to loads of people, really interesting folk from around the world, relentlessly knocking back 50p drinks before heading out to the streets to visit the vast array of night spots dotted around the city center. :)

Labels: warsaw poland

Posted by Tumbleweeds at 11:42 am | Permalink | Comments

As if weaving in and out of dithering old ladies in a post-Christmas daze isn't already a hideous experience. I saw these for sale (sail?) in Marks and Spencer today. Literally teaching kids it's OK to aim for 50% in a spelling exam.

I can't even believe it.

How did this happen? There must have been several levels where this may have been noticed before the public got to see it. And I thought M&S was for 'posh people and all that'. Clearly not any more. Admittedly, these were probably made in China by some child who would love just one of these slippers as a home, so the fault isn't at the sweatshop - it's squarely with M&S.

I can't decide if getting it wrong on just one, instead of two makes me more angry or not. I mean, even if you did leave school with nothing more than a working knowledge of a Sky Plus remote, you can still see that the shapes are different - there's a different amount of letters and one of them has a gap with a little mark after the U. No excuse.

This isn't the first time M&S have been so shocking:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6208295.stm

Details a T-Shirt sold where the slogan reads 'Mum's dreaming of a quiet Christmas just like the one's she used to know'. Brilliant.

Secondly, there's:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1888977,00.html

Here M&S have a pyjama top with two giraffes on it with the words 'Baby Giraffe's'.

I can live with "MOT's", and "Banana's half price, passed there sail bye date", but not this!

Posted by Tumbleweeds at 2:06 pm | Permalink | Comments

Yet again, tradition dictates that we bring a tree indoors and give the cat a great excuse to shit in the house.

We just got a Christmas tree for the lounge and it got me thinking how this ever became normal. Imagine we visited an alien planet and discovered that once a year, the top of the evolutionary chain in this discovered world would bring a plant indoors, cover it with lights, plastic balls and sweet food produce. Quiz their sanity as they watch it die slowly over the following 10 days as the Dyson struggles to keep up with it's dropping foliage. Then, when it's completely dead, muse how they put it in a corner of the garden and hope one day a passing drunkard takes it off their little alien hands. I'm pretty certain this is the prime reason we've yet to see life outside of our own, crazy, tree-hugging world.

I know that sounds a bit Anti Christmas (not Santa's sister), which isn't me at all. I love Christmas, the smell of the tree (when not concocted with cat poo), and everything else to do with this merry season. Amen.

Posted by Tumbleweeds at 1:31 pm | Permalink | Comments